1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to electronic connectors and more particularly relates to an improved phone plug for telephones that share a home data network implemented upon a phone line system in a residential home.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is a rapidly growing communication network of interconnected computers and computer networks around the world. Together, these millions of connected computers form a vast repository of multimedia information that is readily accessible by any of the connected computers from anywhere at any time. Just as there is a critical need for high-speed connections to the information on the Internet, there is a growing need to rapidly move information between devices within a home, for example, data transferring from a first computing device in one room to a second computing device in another room. Businesses accomplish this by deploying Local Area Networks (LANs); however, networks are not commonly deployed in the home due to the cost and complexity of installing the new wiring system typically required by the traditional LANs. Nevertheless, there exists a phone line system in nearly every home in the United States. Therefore a demand for a simple high-speed and cost-effective home network based on the existing phone line system is tremendously growing.
The driving force behind the home network is the growth of on-line households and the growing number of homes with two or more personal computers. It is reported that more than 47 percent of U.S. households are likely to have Internet access devices by 2002, with some 20 percent of this subset owning multiple devices that need to share access to the Internet as well as each other. With the increased focus on computers in education and the boom in Internet connectivity, a large number of personal computers being purchased today are additional personal computers, as opposed to replacement units. Today, it is estimated that over 15 million of the nearly 100 million homes in the United States have two or more personal computers. This number is growing 30 percent annually.
FIG. 1 shows a home data network over an existing wiring structure in a residential home. There is a computer 102 and a printer 104 coupled to a pair of phone lines 100 for data communication therebetween. The phone lines 100 are pre-existent and primarily for the telephone 106 or 108 for voice communication with the outside world through the public switched telephone network (PSTN) 110. It is generally understood that each telephone device presents small capacitance to the phone lines 100. Typically, the frequency of voice communication is low and hence the capacitance does not affect the voice communication over the phone lines 100. When the same phone lines 100 are used for data communication with the capacitance from the coupled telephone devices, the capacitance can significantly affect the signal quality of the data communication between the computing devices. The reason is primarily due to the very high signal frequency in the data communication. There is therefore, a great need for a cost-effective solution that can alleviate the effect from the capacitance of the telephone devices in data communication over a data network implemented upon a telephone line system.